From USA Today: "For 11 years, Laura Ellen Hopper has been spinning discs at KPIG-FM in tiny Freedom, Calif., taking requests from listeners in nearby places such as Santa Cruz and Monterey. But lately her audience base has expanded to fans outside the general area -- in Bosnia, Moscow and Paris, for example.

"KPIG is now on the World Wide Web, where Arbitron just ranked the station in a virtual second-place tie with Webcaster Christian Pirate Radio, averaging 81,000 listeners -- double the 40,000 or so folks who tune in to KPIG in any given half-hour on the airwaves..."

All right, let's stop right there! The most amazingly glaring error is that the 81,000-listener figure quoted above is a monthly cume, while the 40,000 figure is supposedly an average persons estimate.

The reader thinks, "Ah, KPIG's got twice as many people listening to their Internet stream as to their broadcast signal!" But in fact that's wrong. Only a small fraction of KPIG's 81,000 monthly cumers would be listening during the average half-hour...

But, but, but...wait! KPIG can't possibly have a 40,000-person audience in the average half-hour on the airwaves! That's a New York City-caliber audience size! And KPIG is only a decently-rated station in Monterey-Salinas -- market #74. That 40,000-person number must be a weekly cume that's being mischaracterized.

So maybe both numbers are really cumes, then. Maybe we're comparing similar numbers -- McIntosh apples to Golden Delicious apples, anyway. But the reader's conclusion above is still wrong, because broadcast listeners listen much longer than Internet listeners, and that almost certainly means that KPIG's broadcast audience is still much larger at any moment than their Internet audience.

Furthermore, it's an extreme micharacterization to say that Christian Pirate Radio and KPIG have the 2nd and 3rd largest audiences on the Web. Why? Because 90% of the stations on the Web aren't participating in Arbitron's study!

To be continued...
Please check back later today for more, including a look at USAToday.com's "Quick Question" (shown in screenshot above).

(Related USA Today article on SonicNet is here.)

SonicBox and iBeam partner for ad insertion
From Radio Business Report: Sonicbox and iBEAM Broadcasting Corporation, a provider of Internet broadcast network services, announced an agreement (6/12) to make their ad insertion technologies compatible. As part of the deal, they agreed to work together to adopt a common flagging specification for marking ad spots in streaming digital audio content. Flagging allows ad spots on radio broadcast streams to be marked so that they can be replaced, or stripped with different, targeted ads for streaming listeners... Stations then become part of an ad network with their existing stopsets. Sonicbox, with its “iM Band,” is an Internet radio network that with software, hardware, a remote tuner and proprietary technologies, allows listeners to tune to a wide range of streaming stations on their home stereos. Read more from RBR.com here.

Global online advertising said to soar
From Media Central: Online advertising is expected to reach $28 billion by 2005 compared to just $4.3 billion last year, a new study said Monday. Jupiter Communications Inc. a leading authority on ecommerce and the Internet, said in a report issued ahead of the International Advertising Festival that nearly six percent of global ad spending would be generated on the Web within five years, driven in part by the rise in the worldwide online population to 800 million from 300 million now. Read the full Media Central piece here.

June 14-17	PROMAX & BDA, New Orleans
July 13-16	Upper Midwest Conclave, Minneapolis
August 3-5	Morning Show Bootcamp, New Orleans
September 20-23	NAB Radio Show, San Francisco
October 5-7	Billboard/Airplay Monitor Seminar, New York
November 5-7	NAB European Radio Conference, Berlin
Nov. 28-Dec. 1	Radio Ink Internet Conference, Santa Clara, CA

xxx

Try it out! Explore the wide world of Internet audio by clicking the screenshot above.

Miss an issue?
Visit the RAIN News Archives here.